1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus and method arranged to read coded information, more specifically, preventing loss of the coded information.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, along with a development in information technology for office environments, security issues draw more attention. For example, if customer information held by a company is leaked out, privacy of individuals may be threatened, which becomes a large social problem.
In general, in order to cope with these problems, for example, such a method is adopted for preventing the leakage that only persons having an access right can access computerized classified information. Also, such a measure is employed that a monitoring apparatus or the like is provided to a firewall of a personal computer (PC) which is connected to the internet to prevent the classified computerized information from being leaked to the outside of the company. In this manner, in the case of the classified computerized information, the monitoring policy is decided in the above-described manner and executed so that the classified information can be guarded.
On the other hand, in a case where the classified information is printed on sheet medium by an image forming apparatus or the like, it is difficult to check or restrict bringing-out of the sheet on which the classified information (classified information on organizations and private information on individuals) is printed to the outside of the company. For this reason, a restriction on bringing-out of the sheet on which the classified information is printed is more difficult than a restriction on bringing-out of the classified computerized information, which causes difficulty in maintenance of the security.
In recent years, by utilizing a digital watermark technology or an information embedding technology based on a two-dimensional barcode or the like, at the time of the printing, in addition to the main image, a technology is used for embedding information other than the image to the sheet medium itself. As an example of a method of utilizing such embedded information, the following use case is conceivable. For example, in a case where the image is printed, information on a user who has printed the image or the like is embedded as the information other than the image. In a case where the image is the classified information, it is possible to identify the user who has printed the classified information on the basis of the embedded information. Therefore, in a case where the information is leaked out without discretion as the print output of the classified image is brought out, the person who has leaked the information is accused on the basis of tracking information, and it is thus possible to expect a deterrent effect for the information leakage.
In addition, as another use case of the embedded information, such a system is proposed that by using the digital watermark technology or the two-dimensional barcode technology in the related art, when the printing is executed, copy restriction information is embedded to the sheet medium itself. In this system, when the original to which the copy restriction information is embedded is copied by the image forming apparatus, the copy restriction information is extracted to detect whether the copying is allowed or restricted, and a control regarding continuation or aborting of the copy is performed for each page. Furthermore, in this system, password information and permitted user information are embedded as condition information to only allow particular users to perform the copying (for example, see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-280469). The above-described use case of the embedded information is for preventing the leakage of the classified image, that is, for the security. It is noted that the embedded information may be used for purposes other than the security.
However, for example, in the image forming apparatus, in a case where image data obtained by scanning the original to which the information is embedded is subjected to an image processing of degrading the resolution or the like, the embedded information may be lost (unusable). In a case where the image data whose embedded information is lost is sent to another image processing apparatus or the like, the image without the embedded information is output by the image processing apparatus at the sending destination. For example, in a case where the embedded information is used for the above-described security reason, the loss of the embedded information may be a factor of a security hole.